Want to aid science? You can Zooniverse

Steve Johnson

To the world's lengthening list of possible leisure-time activities, you can add this rather surprising one: Do hard-core, but not particularly hard, scientific research.

Thanks to Zooniverse, a project headquartered at the Adler Planetarium, Oxford University and zooniverse.org — and recently aided by an almost $2 million grant from Google — hundreds of thousands of "citizen scientists" have been empowered to contribute to research papers and advance knowledge in fields ranging from astronomy to meteorology.

"We're allowing people from all over the world to participate in authentic research," says Laura Whyte, director of citizen science at the lakefront astronomy museum. "From the point of view of participation in science and understanding of science, that's kind of revolutionary. We're not asking you to passively learn about science. We're asking you to participate."

Whyte's Chicago-based team of about a dozen scientists, programmers and educators moved last year into a public space at the Adler, a citizen-science fishbowl nestled amid the sorts of outer-space photographs that some of the Zooniverse projects ask participants to analyze.

Even with the glass walls, it can get a little noisy, says Whyte, an astronomy Phd and former high school-level teacher in her native U.K. "But when I hear little children go, 'Hey, cool, it's scientists,' that makes it a little more worthwhile," she says.

On its website, Zooniverse hosts almost two dozen active research efforts that, essentially, have more data to comb through than a typical team of scientists can handle.

The project designs a framework for amateurs, over the web, to step up and do some of the data analysis themselves.

These include looking at telescopic images to detect planets in space, at medical pictures to find and classify cancers in human tissue, and at camera-trap photos to identify animals in Africa's Serengeti National Park. In one of the two current projects listed under humanities, citizen scholars are asked to annotate and tag soldiers' diaries from World War I.

"We're making it possible to do science in ways that it wasn't possible before," Whyte says. "These images would have sat on a disc somewhere until they had enough money to hire enough graduate students to plow through them all. And to be honest, that might never have been the case."

And while computers can help bring amateur and professional scientists together, they are not capable of doing these types of analysis with the same proficiency as humans.

"Humans excel at pattern recognition," says Whyte, whether it's the unmistakable outline of a hyena or the warp in a space photograph that suggests the presence of a previously undiscovered planet. Zooniverse volunteers have found four of those, in the Planet Hunters project.

You could call the work a coordination of the Internet's renowned "hive mind." Or you could call it "crowdsourced research" and "the Internet's largest platform for citizen science projects," as Google did in granting Zooniverse $1.8 million in December as one of its Global Impact Award winners.

"Zooniverse will make crowdsourcing a practical part of every researcher's toolkit," said the Google citation (at google.com/giving), and "turn curious consumers into engaged citizen scientists, working alongside professional research teams to accelerate the scientific discoveries of tomorrow."

The money "is hugely exciting," says Whyte. "It will allow us to take the platform we've developed and make it accessible to anybody. So anyone in the world should be able to spin up their own citizen science project as easily as you might spin up a blog."

The project began at Oxford in 2007 where researcher Kevin Schawinski was classifying types of galaxies in space images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. He had a million to go through, and in the first week of hard work only made it through 50,000.

At a pub, he and a friend, astronomer Chris Lintott (who is still with Zooniverse), hit on the idea of asking the Internet to help out, as NASA had recently done with images of interstellar dust. By the first day's end, according to an account in Britain's The Observer newspaper, the volunteers analyzed as many images in an hour as Schawinski had in a month.

They called the project Galaxy Zoo, and its classifications have contributed to more than two dozen published papers and become a standard reference work, according to Whyte.

Having proved so spectacularly that the amateur participation model could work, those classifications also led to the creation of the umbrella organization for citizen science, Zooniverse, and its American presence at the Adler, a natural fit because of the planetarium's expertise in space and education, Whyte says.

As for the citizen scientists, Zooniverse has had at least one participant from almost every country in the world ("We're not sure about North Korea," says Whyte). The only requirements, she says, are "free time and an Internet connection, yes, and some enthusiasm. We've made the problems very straightforward so they're about shape recognition, about matching. There are click-on buttons."

As for the possibility of error, built-in redundancy means participants needn't worry about gumming up the works with a mistake: The data is analyzed by many participants and the group consensus rules.

Yet for all the simplification of the procedures, participating goes beyond that, wrote Tim Adams in The Observer: "The task is compulsive, and surreal; once you have classified your first 20 or 30 impossibly distant star swirls, you have to remind yourself that the images on your computer exist, or once existed, beyond the square of your screen at a scale you cannot comprehend."

In Evanston, Janet Bein, 66, a retired quality control inspector for a housewares firm, has found similar fascination in transcribing Royal and U.S. Navy ships' logs from World War I and before for the Zooniverse project called Old Weather.

The aim is to help fill in the historical weather record to better understand climate change.

"I love it," says Bein. "It is doing more extensive global good than I ever did on the job as a quality control manager. There I did good, but we were making little things for American kitchens."

She likes, too, that it is more intellectually challenging than some of the other citizen science projects because "no two log keepers write the same thing in exactly the same way."

For instance, Bein says, "sea ice is never measured in the numbers. Sea ice is measured in the comments they make when they're complaining that the sea ice is slowing them down. We're putting together a picture of where the sea ice used to be."

She became a "moderator" on the project, helping to guide less experienced citizen scientists and "keep spammers out."

Participants begin to identify closely with the ships whose records they transcribe, she says, and with the men aboard them.

"It was history in specific," Bein says. "I have always hated history classes where I had to memorize the dates of the wars and the kings and whatever. It was faceless. This (project) was all looking at history from the ground up, not the top down. You're getting teenage lieutenants writing in the log what the ship is doing."

Similarly, Zooniverse's expanding number of projects is contributing to science from the ground up.